Izzy Young, Who Presided Over the Folk Revival, Dies at 90 – The New York Times

Izzy Young in 1963 in front of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village. Mr. Young’s store, Bob Dylan once wrote, “was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute.”CreditDavid Gahr/Getty Images

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Izzy Young in 1963 in front of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village. Mr. Young’s store, Bob Dylan once wrote, “was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute.”CreditCreditDavid Gahr/Getty Images
Izzy Young, whose Greenwich Village shop, the Folklore Center, was the beating heart of the midcentury folk music revival — and who in 1961 presented the first New York concert by a young Bob Dylan — died on Monday at his home in Stockholm. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Philomène Grandin.
Anyone wanting to capture the essence of the times could do far worse than head to the Folklore Center, at 110 Macdougal Street, between Bleecker and West Third Streets. Established in 1957, it was nominally a music store, selling records, books, instruments, sheet music and fan magazines, most sprung from sweat and mimeograph machines, like Sing Out!, Caravan and Gardyloo.
In actual practice, the center was also equal parts hiring hall; Schwab’s Pharmacy, where young hopefuls awaited discovery; matchbox recital space for organized performances and impromptu jam sessions; nerve center for gossip on a par with any small-town barbershop; and forum for continuing, crackling debate on the all-consuming subject of folk music, which thanks in no small part to Mr. Young was enjoying wide, renewed attention.
“I began hanging out at the Folklore Center, the citadel of Americana folk music,” Mr. Dylan wrote in his memoir “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), recalling his arrival in New York in 1961. “The small store was up a flight of stairs and the place had an antique grace. It was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute.”
Crackling loudest above the din was Mr. Young, who, with his horn-rimmed glasses, prodigious vocal capacity and bottomless cornucopia of opinion, was the platonic, genially abrasive New York nebbish from Central Casting.
“His voice was like a bulldozer and always seemed too loud for the little room,” Mr. Dylan wrote. “Izzy was always a little rattled over something or other. He was sloppily good-natured. In reality a romantic. To him, folk music glittered like a mound of gold. It did for me, too.”
Until he closed the shop in 1973 to move to Stockholm and start a similar center, Mr. Young reigned supreme as a handicapper (“The first few times I met Dylan, I wasn’t that impressed,” he said. “But as he began writing those great songs, I realized he was really something”); an impresario (he organized hundreds of concerts throughout the city, including Mr. Dylan’s first formal appearance, at the Carnegie Hall complex, as well as performances by the New Lost City Ramblers, Dave Van Ronk, Jean Ritchieand Phil Ochs); and an evangelist who almost single-handedly put the “Folk” in Folk City, the storied Village nightclub.
He was also a writer, with a regular column in Sing Out!; a broadcaster, with a folk music show on WBAI in New York; an agitator (in 1961, he helped organize successful public protests after the city banned folk music from Washington Square Park); a ferocious keeper of the castle (“He was even known to throw people out of his store,” Dick Weissman, a former member of the folk group the Journeymen, wrote, “simply because they irritated him”); and an equally ferocious defender of the faith. (Mr. Young repudiated Mr. Dylan after he began wielding an electric guitar in the mid-’60s.)
If, at the end of the day, the Folklore Center was a less-than-successful capitalist enterprise — who, after all, goes into folk music to get rich? — it scarcely mattered. Joni Mitchell was discovered there. Peter found Marythere, after seeing her photo on a wall. (Paul joined them soon afterward.) Mr. Van Ronk, then the more established musician, met the newly arrived Mr. Dylan there and invited him to take the stage at the nearby Gaslight Cafe.
Mr. Young, in short, was the original folknik — quite literally, for it was he who had coined the term, in the late 1950s, as attested by the Oxford English Dictionary.
One of Mr. Young’s most memorable achievements was presenting Bob Dylan’s first New York concert, at Carnegie Chapter Hall in 1961. 
CreditAmerican Folklife Center, Library of Congress
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One of Mr. Young’s most memorable achievements was presenting Bob Dylan’s first New York concert, at Carnegie Chapter Hall in 1961. 
CreditAmerican Folklife Center, Library of Congress
Israel Goodman Young was born on March 26, 1928, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and reared in the Bronx. His parents, Philip and Pola, were Jewish immigrants from Poland.
As a youth, Izzy spent most of his time, he later said, “trying to avoid committing myself to anything.”
Then, while a student at the Bronx High School of Science, he was smitten by folk dancing, becoming a member of the American Square Dance Group. The company, founded in New York by the folklorist and teacher Margot Mayo, revived traditional dances of many kinds.
The dances led him to folk music, and he was soon collecting books on the subject. He attended Brooklyn College but did not finish.
In the mid-1950s, after working for several years at Borough Park Shomer Shabbos, the bakery his father had established in Brooklyn, Mr. Young became a dealer in rare folk-music books. His private clients included Harry Belafonte and Burl Ives.
He opened the Folklore Center in April 1957, and it quickly became a mecca for pleasurable activity of all kinds.
“Drugs weren’t allowed,” Mr. Young told the newspaper The Weekend Australian in 2013. “But every time you opened the toilet door a big cloud of purple smoke would waft out.”
In the early 1960s, Mr. Young persuaded a Village restaurateur, Mike Porco, to emphasize folk musicians at his establishment, Gerdes. They proved such a success that the restaurant’s name was changed to Gerdes Folk Cityand eventually simply to Folk City.
Over the years, Folk City featured the likes of Mr. Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Muddy Waters. It closed in 1987.
In 1961, Mr. Young helped spearhead a protest known in the press as the Beatnik Riot. That year, the New York City Parks Department, under pressure from conservative groups and real estate interests, banned folk musicians from Washington Square Park. The park, in the heart of the Village, had been a traditional gathering and performing place for musicians since the 1940s.
With the Rev. Howard R. Moody, the minister of the nearby Judson Memorial Church, Mr. Young formed the Right to Sing Committee. On April 9, 1961, as scores of New York City police officers looked on, the committee staged a protest in the park, with hundreds of musicians marching and singing.
Mr. Young in 2016 at the Folklore Centrum in Stockholm, the successor to the Folklore Center. It endured for more than four decades before closing last November, as an announcement said, “due to Izzy’s age.”CreditCasper Hedberg for The New York Times
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Mr. Young in 2016 at the Folklore Centrum in Stockholm, the successor to the Folklore Center. It endured for more than four decades before closing last November, as an announcement said, “due to Izzy’s age.”CreditCasper Hedberg for The New York Times
“I have everybody singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ ” Mr. Young told NPR in 2011. “I said, ‘They can’t hit us on the head while we’re doing that.’ ”
The committee held more demonstrations in the weeks that followed but could not stop the State Supreme Court from upholding the city’s ban later that spring. In July, however, an appellate court lifted the ban, and the park was once more awash in folk music.
The Folklore Center moved to Sixth Avenue in 1965. Eight years later, after being transfixed by traditional Swedish fiddle music, Mr. Young closed the store and relocated to Stockholm, where he opened the Folklore Centrum.
There, as in New York, he led a threadbare existence. In 2014, Mr. Young put up for auction at Christie’s the manuscripts of two obscure early songs by Mr. Dylan: “Talking Folklore Center,” about the old Macdougal Street establishment, and “Go Away You Bomb,” about nuclear disarmament. Both failed to meet their reserve price and were not sold.
The Folklore Centrum remained open and active for more than four decades; Mr. Young was presenting concerts there as late as the spring of 2018. But that November the center announced that it would be closing at the end of the month “due to Izzy’s age.”
The announcement said that Mr. Young’s daughter, Ms. Grandin, a Swedish actress, had “spent the last few months cataloging and packing up Izzy’s vast folklore library” and hoped to sell it “as one collection to any interested parties.”
“It’s sad to close the place,” Ms. Grandin said at the time, “but it has been a beautiful ride and it’s so nice to see all the love and music that Izzy is still surrounded with.”
In addition to Ms. Grandin, Mr. Young is survived by a son, Thilo Egenberger, and three grandchildren.
Mr. Young was the subject of a documentary, “Izzy Young: Talking Folklore Center” (1989), directed by Jim Downing. His Sing Out! columns and other articles were anthologized in “The Conscience of the Folk Revival:The Writings of Israel ‘Izzy’ Young” (2013), edited by Scott Barretta.
Perhaps Mr. Young’s most memorable achievement came in presenting Mr. Dylan’s first New York concert, atCarnegie Chapter Hall— a space of about 200 seats above what is now Weill Recital Hall, on West 57th Street — on Nov. 4, 1961. The program included Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” and Roy Acuff’s “Freight Train Blues.”
Though the concert is now considered a landmark, Mr. Young, who charged $2 a ticket, lost money.
“There were only 53 people there,” he told an interviewer in 2004. “Now 3,000 people remember it well.”
 
 

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